Top News Stories

Pioneer Tucson Educator Oyama Dies

Story by AZPM Staff

last updated March 20, 2013

Henry "Hank" Oyama, a pioneer Tucson educator who spent part of his teen years in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese Americans, died Wednesday, his family reported. He was 86.

PHOTO: AZPM

Henry 'Hank' Oyama.

Oyama, who served in a U.S. Army intelligence unit in World War II after leaving the internment camp, was a teacher at Pueblo High School in Tucson and served in Pima Community College's early years as director of bilingual and international studies.

He later became Pima associate dean, according to postonupdates.blogspot.com, and in 1989, Oyama was appointed a vice president at the college. He retired in 1991 and was named vice president emeritus.

According to the Poston Updates blog site, Oyama was born in Tucson June 1, 1926, five months after his father died. He learned to speak both fluent Spanish and English as a child. When he was 15, in 1942, he, his sister and their mother were taken to Poston Camp near the Arizona-California line and held for 15 months with other Japanese Americans.

He enlisted in the Army two years after his release from the internment camp and served through the end of the war, eventually retiring from the military at the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

A 2009 story in The Arizona Capitol Times described Oyama's pioneering effort to overturn racist laws in Arizona, most especially a law banning interracial marriage.

As a Japanese American, he and his would-be bride, Mary Ann Jordan, a Caucasian, were not allowed to marry under state law. The couple fought the law and won what became a landmark legal decision.

Comment

AZPM encourages comments, but comments that contain profanity, unrelated information,
threats, libel, defamatory statements, obscenities, pornography or that violate the law are
not allowed. Comments that promote commercial products or services are not allowed. Comments
in violation of this policy will be removed. Continued posting of comments that violate this
policy will result in the commenter being banned from the site.

By submitting your comments, you hereby give AZPM the right to post your comments
and potentially use them in any other form of media operated by this institution.

Share This

Related Stories

Henry "Hank" OyamaMark McLemore talks with Mr. Oyama, who is being honored by the ACLU for his role in a historic decision 50 years ago that took the law against interracial marriage off the books in Arizona.